74-75.qxp_Grid 10/01/2020 18:56 Page 2
Retailer Face To Face
Walker
The Talker
Hazel Walker admits she has upped her reading habit since she joined Waterstones last March as senior buyer The Power by Naomi Alderman ranking high in her recommendations - but she also reveals that the bookshop chain’s greeting card sales have increased significantly too, and there is more to come. PG met up with Hazel to find out more about ‘the storyline’ planned for this year.
would make a good plotline for a novel. Well-respected Paperchase greeting card buyer is just about to take off on a threemonth travel sabbatical to South America with her husband, when, out of the blue, she receives a dream job opportunity that is just too good to turn down. Happily for Hazel, Waterstones was prepared to wait a few months for her to return from an amazing trip before she got stuck into the new role of heading up the buying for the card, wrap, calendars and diaries products. “I admit it has been something of a whirlwind and not anything I had planned. I loved my time at Paperchase, and all the people there who had been part of my life for a total of ten years, but the chance to really make a difference at Waterstones, and
It
74
PROGRESSIVE GREETINGS WORLDWIDE
hopefully turn it into a destination for cards, is such an exciting proposition,” explains Hazel. Since Hazel joined the book retailer last March, its card sales have increased almost 10%, with double digit growth on Christmas cards as part of this. Waterstones’ calendar sales too have nudged ahead. While Hazel is buoyed by this growth, as she sees it: “We’ve only just started! There is hopefully a lot more to come.” The move away from being supplied via brokerage in 2015 set Waterstones on the right path, Hazel feels, enabling it to curate the right offer for its customers. “It is challenging as we have 282 stores in the group which vary considerably in size as well as in the demographics of their respective customer base,” explains Hazel.
Above: Hazel joined Waterstones in March last year as senior buyer. Below left: The Jermyn Street entrance of Waterstones’ flagship store in London’s Piccadilly leads straight into the greeting card and stationery department. Bottom: Blank and art cards account for around 35% of Waterstones’ total sales across the 282 store estate.
The London Piccadilly flagship store (where Hazel and the buying team are based) encompasses a sizeable card department that offers over 1,500 different greeting card designs. It is effectively a ‘store within a store’ welcoming customers as they enter from the Jermyn Street entrance, with calendars, stationery and gifts all around and a café on a mezzanine. But other Waterstones stores do not have this luxury. For greeting card purposes, each Waterstones store falls into one of ten different types, the largest of which will offer around 1,000 different card designs while the smallest have a condensed selection in one display bay (less than 100 designs). But there are then permutations within these, as the design selection differs store to store. “We accommodate not only the demographics of the customer base, but also reflect the local flavour with around a fifth of the designs in each store being pertinent to the area, be it in subject matter, artist or text,”